News

2017-11-08 - POOSL 4.1 Released

POOSL 4.1 has finally emerged with a number of new and exciting features. A few highlights include:

A new importlib construct has been added that allows classes on a POOSL path configured in the IDE or passed as a command line parameter to Rotalumis to be imported without specifying a complete path. This is particularly useful to provide convenient access to library classes that are used by many projects. This also improves portability of POOSL code to other environments where libraries may be stored on a different path.

Unit testing has been integrated in the language by means of @Test annotations that enables methods in data classes to be designated as test methods. In addition, the IDE has been extended with an option to run a POOSL model as a test, causing all test methods in all data classes to be executed.

Initialization methods, a notion similar to constructors used in other languages, have been added to data classes. This simplifies POOSL programming e.g. by ensuring that local variables have been initialized such that this does not have to be checked in every method.

User contributions are now distributed next to examples and libraries. User contributions are generic classes or examples that are considered useful to the POOSL community, but are not guaranteed to be as stable or maintained as the POOSL libraries. A current highlight of the User contributions is data classes for remote procedure calls using the JSON-RPC protocol. An example is also included to demonstrate how this can be used to easily call Python functions from POOSL. Just like examples and libraries, User contributions are downloaded separately from the website.

2017-04-12 - New Video Tutorials

Our friends at the Eindhoven University of Technology have made two video tutorials explaining how to install POOSL and demonstrating basic POOSL modeling concepts. Go have a look!

2017-03-30 - POOSL 4.0 has Arrived!

It has been almost a year since the last POOSL release, which is an unusually long time. The reason is that something big has been in the making and we are now excited to prevent a new major release, dubbed POOSL 4.0. Three example highlights in this release are:

Switch statements have been added to the language

Console has been added as a native data class

Native Rotalumis support for POOSL files formats, making generation of large XML files redundant

In addition, there have been important performance improvements that reduce the launch times of simulations, as well as significantly reducing the memory requirements. For a complete list of changes, please refer to the release notes.

We hope that you will enjoy using this new version as much as we enjoyed making it!

2017-03-28 - New Landing Page

As you can see, the landing page on the POOSL website has been changed to focus more on what matters to users of the tool. As a result, the new page talks less about what POOSL is and does in favor of putting the spotlight on recent developments and news. This gives us the perfect place to announce new releases of plugins, libraries and documentation, such as the exciting major POOSL release that is just around the corner.

We hope that you like the new landing page and that it helps you find what you are looking for on the website. Fans of the previous landing page can still find it on the newly added "About" page.